The present invention relates to explosives devices and, more particularly, to a system and a method for explosive devices in the clearance of minefields.
Minefield clearance falls generally into two categories: assault breach and wide-area clearance.
Assault breach, as its name implies, is principally concerned with a rapid clearance of a pathway through a defended minefield for the passage of vehicles and personnel. Frequently, this must be done under adverse combat conditions in which personnel safety is at risk. Thus, assault breach is not cost sensitive.
Wide-area clearance addresses full clearance of all mines emplaced in an area after active conflict is terminated. Conventional wide-area clearance techniques include visual detection, manual probing of the ground, and sweeping the ground with electronic detectors. These techniques are slow, incomplete, expensive, and dangerous to personnel. The present invention is particularly directed toward wide-area clearance.
One method for mine clearance includes detonating a charge in the vicinity of the mine to either explode the mine or otherwise render it inoperative. One technique used in assault breach employs a fuel-air explosive. A fuel-air explosive is one in which a liquid fuel such as, for example, propylene oxide, is explosively disseminated to form an aerosol cloud of fuel in air. The aerosol cloud may itself be detonated for a limited time after its formation. The fuel-air-explosive devices used in assault breach are unsatisfactory for wide-area clearance due to their expense, construction, and the presence of accessories which interfere with the desired functions in wide-area clearance, or which distribute debris which must be removed from the area. For example, conventional fuel-air explosive warheads are contained in a metal casing capable of producing metal shards that must be collected from the area after detonation. In addition, such warheads include safe and arm devices and cloud detonators that are not useful in wide-area clearance and thus must be removed before use.
It has been observed that it is possible to form several touching clouds of fuel-air explosive and that a detonation initiated in one of them is capable of propagating to the others of them to enlarge the total area affected by a single explosive event. This observation is applied to an invention next described.